Archives for December 2012

December 31, 2012 by kevinstilley

Spring Textbooks

Below are the textbooks I will be using in my classes this semester:

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY – HIS 3203

WESTERN CIV II – HIS 1213

EARLY WESTERN CIVILIZATION – HIS 1103

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
Holman Bible Atlas: A Complete Guide to the Expansive Geography of Biblical History
First and Second Maccabees (New Collegeville Bible Commentary: Old Testament Series)

EARLY WESTERN CIVILIZATION SEMINAR – IDE 1103

Greek Tragedies, Volume 1
A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning (Isi Guides to the Major Disciplines)
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Students, this edition is not available at most retailers; you will probably need to purchase it at the campus bookstore to get the best price.)
The Metaphysics (Penguin Classics)
The Art of Rhetoric (Penguin Classics)
Poetics (Penguin Classics)
Plato: Republic
Timaeus and Critias (Penguin Classics)

December 14, 2012 by kevinstilley

Our Mishandling of Tragedy

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way?

No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem?

No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:1-5, ESV)

In the coming days every radio talk show and television news program will be discussing this week’s tragic events. They will host philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and sociologists who will discuss the problem of evil ad nauseam. They will try their best to help the populace make sense of the senseless.

And, when they get tired of those topics they will move on to the political issues; — gun control, school security, the cultural ramifications of violence in movies and music, etc.

On Sunday morning pastors will stand in their pulpits and explore such themes as the depravity of man, the comfort of God, trusting God when we do not understand, and more.

What a shame.

All of those issues are important and need to be repeatedly revisited and explored in depth, but by doing so immediately following such tragic events we fail to follow the instruction and example of Jesus found in Luke 13.

In Luke 13, Jesus addresses two tragic events. He could have gone on for hours about the themes mentioned above. But, he did not. Instead he shared with those making inquiry that repentance is the correct course of action for those who are not personally involved but are witnesses to tragedy.

Why repent?

The key to understanding his instruction is contained in the last few words of explanation “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” When Jesus said that they would “likewise perish” he did not mean that a tower would fall on them or that they would have their blood mixed with the sacrifices. He meant that they would die without being prepared.

For most people death comes unexpectedly. At the same time that these victims were being violently attacked and murdered in this horrendous event there were perhaps teenagers dying in car accidents, stray bullets hitting bystanders in drive-by shootings, a farmer being caught in his equipment and torn to shreds, an old woman losing her life to a druggie who wanted her social security check, or an old man simply not waking from his night’s sleep. Death comes unexpectedly.

Jesus said that when we become witnesses to the unexpected tragedies of others to whom we are not personally ministering our response is not to be voyeuristic gawkers, philosophical soothsayers, or even theologians. It is a time for personal reflection and repentance.

In the weeks following 9/11 church attendance soared in the United States. A few months later, attendance had not only returned to previous levels but had actually diminished. Why?

If we see a funeral, or walk among graves, as the image of death is then present to the eye, I admit we philosophise admirably on the vanity of life. We do not indeed always do so, for those things often have no effect upon us at all. But, at the best, our philosophy is momentary. It vanishes as soon as we turn our back, and leaves not the vestige of remembrance behind; in short, it passes away, just like the applause of a theatre at some pleasant spectacle. Forgetful not only of death, but also of mortality itself, as if no rumour of it had ever reached us, we indulge in supine security as expecting a terrestrial immortality. (John Calvin, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 4)

During those critical months following 9/11 Americans demonstrated an openness to spiritual things. Pastors and theologians responded by comforting those who had been entrusted to their care and by attempting to cultivate understanding. Meaning well, leaders sought to do what they thought was best for the specific needs of their people rather than issue a call for personal repentance as Jesus had instructed. And meaning well, they failed.

We have been presented with another tragic opportunity to do what Jesus said rather than what we think is right. Will we listen?

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.” (Luke 6:46-49, ESV)

Will you repent?

December 8, 2012 by kevinstilley

Suffering – select quotes

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.
~ Woody Allen

So, too, the tide of trouble will test, purify, and improve the good, but beat, crush, and wash away the wicked. So it is that, under the weight of the same affliction, the wicked deny and blaspheme god, and the good pray to Him and praise Him. The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer.
~ Augustine of Hippo, City of God, bk 1, ch 8

Christianity isn’t a tool to escape suffering, it’s a lens by which we understand it and the means by which we live through it.
~ Elias Dummer

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains. Suffering is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
~ C.S. Lewis

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Happiness – select quotes

True happiness… arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self.
~ Joseph Addison

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts; therefore guard accordingly.
~ Marcus Aurelius

The strength and the happiness of a man consists in finding out the way in which God is going and going in that way, too.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
~ Rita Mae Brown

Remember, happiness doesn’t depend on who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.
~ Dale Carnegie

Seek to do good and you will find that happiness will run after you.
~ James Freeman Clarke

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
~ Ernest Dimnet

Happy is the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.
~ John Dryden, in “Translation of Horace”

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.
~ Albert Einstein, in The World As I See It

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
~ Anne Frank

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Being miserable is a habit. Being happy is a habit. The choice is yours.
~ Tom Hopkins

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
~ Kin Hubbard

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved—loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
~ Victor Hugo

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
~ Helen Keller

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
~ Abraham Lincoln

There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else.
~ Peyton Conway March

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.
~ John Stuart Mill

How happy a person is depends upon the depth of his gratitude.
~ John Miller

As the astronauts soar into the vast eternities of space, on earth the garbage piles higher; as the groves of academe extend their domain, the alumni’s arms reach lower; as the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence. In great wealth, great poverty; in health, sickness; in numbers deception. Gorging, left hungry; sedated, left restless; telling all, hiding all; in flesh united, forever separate. So we press on through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of stiety, passing through the gardens of fantasy; seeking happiness every more ardently, and finding despair even more surely.
~ Malcolm Muggeridge, in “The Great Liberal Deathwish”

Happiness is neither within or without us—it is in God and only when God is in us is happiness within and without us.
~ Blaise Pascal

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
~ Blaise Pascal

If thou wouldst be happy, bring thy mind to thy condition, and have an indifferency for more than what is sufficient.
~ William Penn

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
~ Ayn Rand

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
~ Albert Schweitzer

Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.
~ William Sheldon

Happiness is mostly a byproduct of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.
~ Benjamin Spock

Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
~ Leon Suenens

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.
~ Martha Washington

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Master List of Great Quotes

December 8, 2012 by kevinstilley

Love – select quotes

For where love is wanting, the beauty of all virtue is mere tinsel, is empty sound, is not worth a straw, nay more is offensive and disgusting.
~ John Calvin

Hunger I can endure; love I cannot.
~ Claudian

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
~ Anton Chekhov

Oh, what a heaven is love! Oh, what a hell!
~ Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, in The Honest Whore

God is love. Not cheap, sentimental love, but redeeming love which cannot be said, but must be seen in the way we live.
~ Harry Denman

More and more I come to value charity and love of one’s fellow being above everything else . . . All our lauded technological progress—our very civilizations—is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
~ Albert Einstein

Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and is certainly something that can’t be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hub Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: “Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet (NY: Harper, 1972), page 45

We love because it’s the only true adventure.
~ Nikki Giovanni

Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
~ Rabbi Julius Gordon

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved—loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
~ Victor Hugo

When love is not madness, it is not love.
~ Pedro Calderon de la Barca

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
– C.S. Lewis

To live without loving is not really to live.
~ Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

We can only learn to love by loving.
~ Iris Murdoch

Love among men is awakened by something in the beloved. But the love of God is free, spontaneous, unevoked, uncaused. God loves men because he has chosen to love them.
~ J. I. Packer

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
~ Dorothy Parker

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Archives for December 2012

Spring Textbooks

Our Mishandling of Tragedy

Suffering – select quotes

Happiness – select quotes

Love – select quotes

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